1. Field of Disclosure
The disclosure generally relates to the consumption of electronic content such as electronic books, and in particular to synchronized switching among different modes of consumption of the electronic content.
2. Background Information
Electronic books (“e-books”) are growing increasingly popular. One benefit of e-books is that they are easily transportable and can be accessed at a variety of locations. For example, a single e-book reader device (“e-reader) can carry many e-books. Thus, a user of the e-reader can carry the e-reader device on his or her person and use the device to read the e-books whenever time permits. Moreover, e-books can be accessed and synchronized using a variety of cloud services. A user can use a dedicated e-reader to read e-books while at home, and use a different e-reader device, such as a mobile telephone, to read the same e-books while on the road.
Oftentimes, e-books are available for consumption in a variety of different modes. For example, an e-book may be available in a traditional text-based version for consumption by reading, and also available in an audio book version for consumption by listening. The audio book version may be narrated by a human actor or other voiceover professional that reads the text with added nuance such as tone or inflection that enhances the enjoyment of the listener.
A user may desire to occasionally switch among the various consumption modes for an e-book. The user may read the text version of the e-book when relaxing at home, but desire to listen to the audio version of the e-book at other times, such as when the user is driving. However, switching among the consumption modes is difficult because the different versions of the e-book are independent. There is no easy way for the user to maintain the same reading/listening position between the text and audio versions of an e-book. Thus, the user must manually locate the correct position when switching consumption modes. This extra effort is time-consuming and detracts from the user's overall enjoyment of the e-book.
One potential solution that addresses the problem described above is to use the e-reader to perform text-to-speech conversion of the text version of the e-book. Here, the e-reader dynamically converts the text of the e-book to spoken words. However, current text-to-speech systems use mechanical-sounding voices that lack the nuance provided in audio e-books by a human narrator. Accordingly, user experience when listening to a text-to-speech conversion of a text e-book does not match that of listening to an audio version of an e-book created with a human narrator.